Live data from Hacker News

Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

tinycorelinux.net

11–20 of 258 posts

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#13
post #5
post #2

Looks really nice, I like the idea. But can they please empower a user interface designer to simply improve the margins and paddings of their interface? With a bunch of small improvements it would look significantly better. Just fix the spacing between buttons and borders and other UI elements.

One could argue that visible borders are a feature, not a bug. If you are trying to maximize for accessibility, that is.

Pretty sure it was not about presence of visible borders, but about missing spacing between borders and buttons. That on some screenshots, but not others. It's not like this ui has some high-density philosophy, it's just very inconsistent

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#14
post #4

The site doesn't have HTTPS and there doesn't seem to be any mention of signatures on the downloads page. Any way to check it hasn't been MITM'd?

Not foolproof. Could compute MD5 or SHA256 after downloading.

And compare it against what?

EDIT: nevermind, I see that it has the md5 in a text file here: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86/release/

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#17

Not to disrespect this, but it used to be entirely normal to have a GUI environment on a machine with 2MB of RAM and a 40MB disk. Or 128K of ram and 400 kb disk for that matter.

A single 1920x1080 framebuffer (which is a low resolution monitor in 2025 IMO) is 2MB. Add any compositing into the mix for multi window displays and it literally doesn’t fit in memory.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not foolproof. Could compute MD5 or SHA256 after downloading.

And compare it against what? EDIT: nevermind, I see that it has the md5 in a text file here: http://www.tinycorelinux.net/16.x/x86/release/

Which is served from the same insecure domain. If the download is compromised you should assume the hash from here is too.

Re: Tiny Core Linux: a 23 MB Linux distro with graphical desktop

#19
post #6
post #2

Looks really nice, I like the idea. But can they please empower a user interface designer to simply improve the margins and paddings of their interface? With a bunch of small improvements it would look significantly better. Just fix the spacing between buttons and borders and other UI elements.

Modern UX trends are a scourge of excessive whitespace and low information density that get in the way of actually accomplishing tasks. Any project that rejects those trends gets bonus points in my book.

Look at screenshots -> wallpaper window. The spacing between elements is all over the place and it simply looks like shit. Seeing this I'm having doubts if the team who did this is competent at all
Post reply on HN